Teamworking: history, development and function: a case study in Welsh local government

(1)

Teamworking: History,

Development and function

A Case Study in Welsh Local Government

By

Mark Gatenby

A Thesis Subm itted in Fulfilment o f the Requirements f o r the

D egree o f D octor o f Philosophy o f C ardiff University

C ardiff Business School

,

C ardiff University

(2)

INFORMATION TO ALL USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,

a note will indicate the deletion.

Dissertation Publishing

UMI U584298

Published by ProQuest LLC 2013. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC.

ProQuest LLC

789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346

(3)

Abstract

Teamworking has been a fashionable management idea in the redesign of work for over half a century. After being observed in UK manufacturing environments in 1950s, the concept has developed and spread widely across industries and international contexts. Today, surveys suggest that management practitioners across all sectors are

enthusiastically adopting teamworking initiatives. However, empirical research has not kept pace with the diffusion o f team ideas in different contexts. There has been relatively little attention to the concept in service industries and particularly in public services. This study takes up the challenge of exploring team ideas in new contexts, conducting a case study within the UK local Government. An ethnographic approach is adopted to enable the collection and analysis of detailed descriptive data. Central concerns include the way in which teamworking is used as a vehicle for organisational change and how employees experience management attempts to implement teamworking. The study findings suggest that there is as much interest in the idea of teamworking in local Government as in traditional team contexts. In the case study, teamworking was used as part of a wide ranging strategy of organisational transformation. More specifically, it was used by senior management as a way to legitimise strategic change and provide a soft veneer to a more demanding performance regime. The ambitious variety of new team initiatives led to considerable implementation problems and resistance from workers. Particular levels of management were seen to be trapped between the old approach and the new team discourse. The study presents a warning for the advocates of teamworking in appreciating senior management motivations for introducing change and considering the unappealing detail when implementing and maintaining teamworking systems.

(4)

STATEMENT 1

This work has not previously been accepted in substance for any degree and is not concurrently submitted in candidature for any degree.

Signed Date ..

STATEMENT 2

This thesis is being submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD.

Signed , ... D a te ... ...

STATEMENT 3

This thesis is the result of my own independent work, except where otherwise stated. Other sources are acknowledged by footnotes giving explicit references.

STATEMENT 4

I hereby give consent for my thesis, if accepted, to be available for photocopying and for inter-library loan, and for the title and summary to be made available to outside organisations.

Signed ...

(5)

(6)

This project has only been possible due to the generous support of various people. I would like to thank the following friends, family and colleagues for sharing their time, experience and resources.

I thank my supervisory panel for providing invaluable advice. My primary supervisor Julian Gould-Williams provided much of the early impetus for the project. He has been indefatigable in providing time and mentoring as I met regular obstacles along the way. Warm thanks also go to Mike Reed and Rachel Ashworth on my supervisory panel for providing incisive comments and encouragement at the panel meetings. The PhD process is an individual journey but periodic advice of how to read the map or reminders to look out of the window to spot important road signs are indispensable. I must thank my family for their unremitting love and support. I thank my mum and dad for the encouragement to keep working hard even if the question ‘so when is it going to be finished then?’ was not always met with the kindest response. I must also show my appreciation to my fiancee Lindsey for putting up with me during the long process and often being a ‘PhD widow’. I look forward to answering the question ‘Have you got to work again tonight?’ with an unequivocal ‘No. I’m all yours!’

I show my gratitude to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding this research and providing support materials.

Finally, thanks go to the research participants who shared their time, insights and experiences. Without them the research would not have been possible.

(7)

List of tables

1 - Bouquets and brickbats 51

2 - Contrast between old and new council philosophy 119

3 - Team Development day Itinerary 153

4 - Extract from Training Needs Analysis 157

5 - Improvement Planning SWOT analysis 163

6 - Human Resource Management Action Plan 189

7 - Job Person Specification 194

8 - Mentoring Induction Checklist 199

9 - Training Programme Feedback 215

10 - Performance Appraisal List 219

(14)

AFL Adults, Families and Life-long learning

AWG Autonomous Work Group

BPR Business Process Reengineering

BPT Business Planning Toolkit

CAQDAS Computer-aided qualitative data analysis software

CBC County Borough Council

CCO Corporate Chief Officer

CCT Compulsory Competitive Tendering

CCTV Closed-circuit Television

Cl Continuous Improvement

CIP Continuous Improvement Programme

CIPD Chartered Institute o f Personnel and Development

CPA Comprehensive Performance Assessment

CPD Continuous Professional Development

CR Critical Realism

DLG Dyffryn Leadership Group

ESRC Economic and Social Research Council

FARM Financial Aid and Risk Management

HPWS High Performance Work Systems

HRM Human Resource Management

IAPT Improvement Action Plan Toolkit

IAS Integrated Adult Services

ICT Information communication Technology

IDeA Improvement and Development Agency

JIT Just-in-time

KKPI Key Killer performance indicator

KPI Key Performance Indicator

KSP Key Strategic Priorities

LGA Local Government Association

LGMA Local Government Modernisation Agenda

LPSA Local Public Service Agreement

LSP Local Strategic Partnership

MD2 Management Development (squared)

MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

NTL National Training Laboratories

ONS Office of National Statistics

PPDP Professional Performance Develop Plan

QBR Quarterly Business Review

QC Quality Circles

QWL Quality of Work Life

SMB Service Management Board

SOP Standard Operating Procedure

STS Socio-technical Systems

TNA Training Needs Analysis

TQM Total Quality Management

WAG Welsh Assembly Government

WERS Workplace Employee Relations Survey

(15)

Research Participants

Ambrose Head o f Business Development (IAS)

Amy Older people coordinator (IAS)

Anna Senior HR adviser

Anthony Head o f Planning

Barry Head o f Improvement Planning

Boris Head o f ICT

Brenda Team member, Improvement Planning

Christine Head o f Care Homes (LAS)

Cynthia Head of Regeneration

Danielle Team member, Improvement Planning

Eddy Team member, Business support (IAS)

Gareth Mail room delivery

Gary Senior HR adviser

Harold Corporate Chief Officer, Finance

James Head o f assessment and care management

Jamie Language support, Corporate Centre

Janet Team leader, Finance applications

Jennifer (Jen) Team member, Improvement Planning

Jimmy HR advisor

John Chief Executive

Julie Director, Corporate Centre

Kate Head o f HR department

Kevin Equalities, Improvement planning

Liz Team leader, Finance budgets

Margaret Team leader, Business Services (IAS)

Mark IT team leader

Melville Head o f Business Services (Corporate)

Mike HR officer

Morgan Procurement Officer

Norman Old Head, HR department

Norman Previous head o f HR (visited several times)

Paula Team leader, Social services

Peter Team member, Business services (IAS)

Phil Head of social care

Rhiannon (Rhi) Team leader, Improvement Planning

Robert Head o f Business support Corporate)

Roger Councillor (and previous Mayor)

Rush Head o f community education

Ryan Team member, Improvement Planning

Sharon PA to Chief Executive

Sue Head of Adult Education (IAS)

Susan (Sue) Team member, Improvement Planning

Trisha Community education coordinator

(16)

a long wooden table bearing a lavish feast o f unimaginable proportions. Yet every guest was pale, starving and cursing each other. They had been given spoons that were twelve feet long and therefore were unable to feed themselves. The old man spoke in revulsion, “This must be hell.”

The man then walked down a path until he reached a similar door. Inside he found the same table, the same beautiful food, and people holding the same twelve foot long spoons. However, in this room there was much laughter and conviviality. Everyone looked healthy and well fed. The old man smiled and said, “In heaven they have learned to feed each other.”

A Parable of Heaven and Hell,

(17)

1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

‘Team’ and ‘teamwork’ are two of the most commonly heard words in organisations today. If you do not work within a team of some kind you have an unusual career. All employees, from junior staff to senior management, are now encouraged to be ‘team players’ and work for the ‘good o f the team’. These ideas have been picked up in all areas o f management discourse. The popular literature has proclaimed the ‘wisdom of teams’ (Katzenbach and Smith, 1993) and formulated the ‘17 indisputable laws of teamwork’ (Maxwell, 2001). Meanwhile, simply being a ‘team’ no longer seems sufficient; we now need ‘smart teams’ (Beatty and Scott, 2004), ‘X-Teams’ (Ancona and Bresman, 2007) and ‘virtuoso teams’ (Boynton and Fischer, 2005). Leading companies even have their own versions: Amazon.com has the ‘2-pizza team’ and Google has the ‘G ooglef. Yet why is there such pervasive interest in this concept?

Buchanan (2000: 25) suggests that there has been an ‘eager and enduring embrace’ with the idea of teamworking for more than fifty years. Like many prolonged debates in social science, this interest has developed, fragmented and reinvented itself in the form of theoretical ‘trajectories’ (Mueller et al., 2000) and pragmatic management ‘waves’ (Procter and Mueller, 2000). Today, surveys record that in the region of eighty per cent o f UK firms claim to be using teamworking of some kind (Kersley et al., 2005). There is similar incidence across Europe and America. The obvious explanation for the interest is that commentators and managers believe that teams are useful tools. They are held to contribute towards various performance outcomes including productivity, efficiency, flexibility, innovation, employee satisfaction and commitment. There also seems to be a moral component, as the epigraph to this thesis suggests. If you identify yourself as a non-team player you are seen as an undesirable employee or even an immoral human being. Teamworking holds progressive moral connotations for social organisations.

An important question for scholars of management theory is: to what extent is ‘teamworking’ a useful concept to describe work organisations and explain the

(18)

complex employment relationship in contemporary organisations? The ‘big themes’ of management theory over the last century have included debates over organisational centralisation versus decentralisation', control versus commitment', routinisation versus flexibility-, and how best to motivate and reward an increasingly well educated workforce in an increasingly competitive world. Teamworking perhaps latches onto all o f these debates. In the literature, team discussion is usually closely associated with the wider literature on employee participation and involvement that has developed rapidly over the last few decades.

A problem with the team literature, like much of the management literature, has been its tendency towards fashionableness. Fashions frequently lead to empty fads and hyperbole which have little substance in organisational reality. Gibson and Tesone (2001) quote Ginzl (1996: 90) to demonstrate the faddishness of team ideas:

You can, if you wish, flatten your pyramid, become a horizontal organization, and eliminate hierarchy from your company. You can empower your people, open your environment, and transform your culture ... You can improve continuously, shift your paradigms, and become a learning organization. You can devote yourself and your company to total quality management.

Fashionable management ideas are sustained by a range o f ‘discourse entrepreneurs’, including: management gurus such as Charles Handy, who insists ‘Teams are here to stay. We cannot avoid them’ (1990: 132); the media, including broadcast, print and increasingly internet publications; and semi-academic literatures, for example trade journals and management magazines (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 1999). A scholarly investigation into the concept o f teamworking therefore has to steer its way through this maze of popular, fashionable and scholarly literature. It must consider the extent to which organisational actors consume and utilise fashionable discourse. This will also require a consideration of the historical and contextual development of the various team concepts.

Many different avenues have opened up over the last fifty years to understand and research teams. One way is to view teamworking as a general management philosophy which encapsulates organisational activity. Within this paradigm teamworking has been viewed as a form o f human resource management (e.g. Redman and Wilkinson, 2007; Legge, 2005), as management control (Barker, 1993;

(19)

3

Sewell, 1998) and as a form of organisational change (Buchanan, 2000). Another way is to look at teamworking is from the perspective of individual teams. This has led to research looking into team structures and differentiation (e.g. Sundstrom et al., 1990; Macy, 1993; Cohen and Bailey, 1997); internal group processes (e.g. interdependence, communication, cohesion, mental models, conflict - see Cartwright and Zander, 1953); team roles (Belbin, 1981); and team performance (e.g. Rosen, 1989). Other important concerns have been how teamworking varies in different contexts (e.g. services versus manufacturing/ public versus private) and how individual employee experience working in teams (e.g. Sinclair, 1992; Harley, 2001).

Like many areas of management studies, the study o f teamworking carries thorny empirical challenges. Since the topic relates to the behaviour and interaction of organisational actors, there are the practical constraints of collecting reliable social research data. Highly competitive organisations are not always open to the idea of external researchers carefully analysing their systems and processes. Equally, in a world where reputation counts for all, organisational actors are unlikely to provide frank accounts o f management techniques and work experiences. Due to these challenges, the discussion of teams has been hampered by poor quality research data. There has been a lack of detailed description of team activities which has led to inadequate conceptualisation and hence the observed tendency towards fashionableness. Studies have also tended to focus on narrow industrial settings, such as automotive manufacturing, which do not easily translate to service work and public sector settings. This study will attempt to take on these challenges.

The challenges of organisational research should not discourage us from attempting to understand the complex employment relationship. Its impact on the current world - from the cultural and technological artefacts it produces, to the geographic and demographic structures of populations, to social/institutional forces such as class, time, leisure and family - cannot be overstated. Teamworking is an important concept in management studies within the broad field of organisational behaviour. A key component of this kind of research is uncovering the human experiences of people in organisational settings. Research can too easily attach itself to the powerful managerialist discourse o f control and performance. While this is an important part of the analysis, theorists are increasingly recognising the need to ‘refocus attention on

(20)

the worker’ (Guest, 2002: 335). This should include the way organisational forces shape employee beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Furthermore, managerial attempts to control workers through performance management and change strategies need to be considered from the perspective o f workers. These will be some of the central concerns o f the thesis.

Aims and structure of the thesis

The purpose o f this thesis is to engage with the management debates about teamworking and make both theoretical and empirical contributions to the topic. The thesis aims to cover three main areas. First, we will consider where teamworking is placed within the context of management philosophies and theories looking at the employment relationship. In other words, where does teamworking sit with the ‘big ideas’ of management over the last century? and how did specific team ideas emerge? Second, the thesis will look at the strength o f team theory. For instance, is teamworking expressed through a clear set of principles or is it a more tentative and contradictory concept? Third, we will consider the empirical evidence of teamworking and contribute to this through a new organisational case study. Following a review of the academic literature we will arrive at five key research questions for empirical investigation: 1) What is the motivation for senior managers introducing teamworking initiatives? 2) How do employees experience working in teams? 3) To what extent are specific team approaches in organisations clear applications o f one o f the two team traditions? 4) How does teamworking affect employee decision making? 5) To what extent does HRM support teamworking activities?

The first four chapters of the thesis will review the theoretical background to the core concepts. Chapter two will introduce the background to the debate. It will discuss the purpose of reviewing the historical developments o f the concept and how early 20th century management discourse shaped the climate in favour of teamworking. Chapter three will then take this discussion further by introducing the specific events which led to the conception of team ideas. It will progress to discuss the main theoretical traditions - identified here as socio-technical systems theory and the Japanese movement. It will present each tradition’s development, general principles, and assess

(21)

5

their relative merits for understanding organisations. Chapter four will bring the discussion up-to-date by reviewing the general climate of the current team literature. It will identify the various perspectives of looking at the concept with considerations such as HRM and organisational change. Furthermore, it will consider the role of management in implementing team change and how successful particular strategies are likely to be.

Chapters five and six will weave in a new thread concerned with the empirical foundations o f the project. Chapter five will explore the philosophical underpinnings of social research. It will attempt to answer what the essential aims of social research are and review the various doctrines that have attempted to provide philosophical direction for social science. It will then identify the adopted perspective for this project. Chapter six will be more practical in orientation. It will set out the choices identified in operationalising the research questions through research strategy. It will identify the main methodological options and explain the adopted approach. Finally, it will describe the research process, including research access, ethics, data collection and analysis.

Chapters seven to eleven will present the main empirical component. Chapter seven will briefly discuss the research context, including the institutional context of local government, the local setting and organisational setting. Chapters eight to eleven will present the main research findings in the form of detailed transcript notes and quotations, along with supporting analytical narrative. The main topics covered here are team environment and management, HRM and quality circles. The end of each findings chapter will bring the relevant literature and the empirical findings together into a theoretical discussion. Chapter twelve will then draw conclusions for the research. This will include identifying the limitations of the study and considering the implications for future research.

(22)

CHAPTER 2

Historical Antecedents

2.1 Introduction

This short chapter will begin to review the extensive literature on teamworking. To do this it will first consider the significance of historical awareness in social science. Concepts tend to proliferate in the management literature with little awareness or connection to other ideas which share similar tenets and principles. The conceptual terrain o f teamworking is no different in this regard. I will therefore attempt to contextualise my position in this literature before moving onto the central debate. The importance o f historical awareness is stated along with the ambiguity of the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ of social phenomena. I will then briefly review the early theories o f management in the twentieth century which set the backdrop for management interest and movements towards teamworking.

2.2 The importance of historical awareness

A relevant question at this stage of the discussion is ‘what is the role of history in the research?’ An appealing response is everything we know is history. The aim of the thesis is to engage with the debates about teamworking in contemporary work organisations. It might therefore be claimed that the rapid pace of change in the nature of work makes any comparison o f contemporary work practices with those of the past merely an academic pursuit with little theoretical or practical relevance for today. However, it is a central argument of this thesis that teamworking is a longstanding concept that has been ‘reinvented’ and ‘rediscovered’ a number o f times over the last fifty years (Buchanan, 2000). Beyerlein (2000: xxiv) asks: ‘are we creating new developments with the design and practice of work teams or merely rediscovering the ideas of prior generations of managers and researchers?’ To answer this it is crucial to trail this history and appreciate its development. As Santayana’s (1905: 284) oft- quoted warning states, ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to revisit it’; or put another way, ‘an awareness of historical antecedents offer researchers protection against one of the gravest of scientific sins: reinventing the wheel.’ (Forsyth and Burnette, 2005: 4) A further consideration in the team literature is the

(23)

7

huge range o f concepts and terms spread across geographical regions and disciplinary areas over time. It is important to appreciate how such conceptual and empirical variety transpired.

A strong theme in the management literature during the last decade has been the rhetorical emptiness of management discourse. An extensive critical literature on management ‘fads’, ‘fashions’ and consultancy has debunked the naive prescriptions and empty packaging o f concepts such as ‘quality circles’ and ‘business process reengineering’ (Abrahamson and Fairchild, 2000). It takes time to wade through this swamp of discourse to find the well-considered ideas and rigorous concepts. Social science has often been plagued with recurrent chameleon-like concepts that move in and out o f fashion over time with little substantive progress. Eminent psychologist G. W. Allport (1964: 149-150) put this dilemma as follows:

Our profession progresses in fits and starts, largely under the spur of fashion... We never seem to solve our problems or exhaust our concepts; we only grow tired o f them ... Old wine, we find, tastes better from new bottles.

The reappearance o f particular ideas does at least hint at an important undercurrent around certain concepts; some underlying mechanism or stable social pattern that is being detected. The problem being that we have not found a solution to the issue, a comprehensive understanding of its dynamics, or a way to progress with it. Hergenhahn (2005) suggests the major benefits o f historical awareness are: first, a deeper understanding and appreciation of a subject area; second, less likely to repeat old mistakes; and third, a source of valuable ideas for the future. Reviewing the major debates o f previous decades suggests there is often more continuity than change in society; more adaptation than revolution. It is therefore crucial to have an historical awareness of the work situation which has led to the development of teamworking and how far it has changed over time.

One of the biggest challenges to an historical discussion is the flexible use of language and difference between rhetorical and substantive evidence (see Benders and van Bijsterveld, 2000); or the ‘software’ and the ‘hardware’ components of phenomena (Rogers, 1995). Rhetorical evidence refers to the use of names and labels for a subject whereas substantive evidence refers to a wider set of detailed descriptions which do not rely explicitly on labels. Rhetorical and substantive

(24)

histories may coincide but this is not necessarily the case (Benders, 2005). In other words, what we call ‘teamworking’ today was not necessarily called ‘teamworking’ in the past. Yet, this does not mean that analogous forms of social organisation did not exist. The earliest use of the word ‘team’ can be traced back to the sixteenth century referring to a chain gang of horses used for labour. The term was not used to refer to human groups until the eighteenth century (Oxford English Dictionary etymology database, 2005). However, the word ‘group’ has been in use for many centuries referring to any assemblage of objects - living or inanimate. Beyerlein (2000: xvii) adopts a simple dichotomy among the various ‘team’ phenomena in history, suggesting, ‘teamwork and possibly work teams [emphasis added] in various forms have probably been used for thousands of years.’ Here Beyerlein uses ‘teamwork’ to denote any form o f normative or functional cooperation, whereas ‘work team’ denotes a specific social group in the context of work organisations. Our concern in this thesis is with formal work organisations; that is, organisations with a legal and/or professional status. These proliferated during the twentieth century and permeate every area o f life today. The work of many authors in the management literature is useful in disentangling the rhetoric and substantive histories o f teamworking.

Before we progress to the historical review a few words need to be said to clarify team terminology. Over the last four decades many labels have emerged in the management literature around the idea o f teams. Various terms have formed around the word ‘group’, including ‘work group’, ‘autonomous work group’, ‘semi- autonomous work group’, ‘high performance work group’ and ‘groupthink’. These terms were the predominant use for cooperative social organisation from the 1940s - 1970s. ‘Group dynamics’ also established itself during this period and is still popular within social (and organisational) psychology. From the late seventies onwards a new set of terms deriving from ‘team’ or ‘teamwork’ grew more popular in the management literature. Labels emerged such as ‘work team’, ‘self-managing team’, ‘high performance team’, ‘self-regulating team’ and ‘teamworking’. There are many other variations on this theme. The term ‘teamworking’ has further increased in popularity over the last decade, largely in Europe, since the introduction of the annual conference International Workshop on Teamworking (first held in Nottingham, 1997). The first publication from this conference was the book Teamworking (edited by S. Procter and F. Mueller, 2000). This usage is similar to Michael Beyerlein’s ‘work

(25)

9

team’ as it attempts to put the concept firmly in the context o f work organisations. This is in contrast to the general term ‘teamwork’, which is used in all social contexts. The terms I have adopted for this thesis are ‘team ’ as a noun denoting a human group within a work context and ‘teamworking’ denoting the wider phenomena that occur within and between individual teams at work. Other terms will be used in passing when referring to particular usages in history. Figure 1 shows the growth in popularity of ‘group’ and ‘team’ concepts in the management literature over the last fifty years1. While both have increased rapidly over the last two decades, ‘group’, with its more general applications, has been most prevalent. ‘Team’ has been more concentrated within management fields such as human resource management and organisational behaviour. The graph illustrates the need to trace the history o f team ideas beyond the last two decades, since this period has witnessed a rapid proliferation of team ideas and discussion, much o f which has been fashionable, faddish and hyperbolic.

Figure 1 G row th o f articles usin g team term s

6000 5000 4000 o 3000 2000 1000 0

f

#

Year

1 Figure 1 was produced using EBSCO Business Source Premier database. This Database contains comprehensive records of most of the generally perceived leading management journals such as

Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy o f Management Review/Journal, Journal o f Management Studies, Organization Studies, etc. Two Boolean search strings: ‘Team OR Teamworking’ and ‘Group OR Work Group’ were searched every other year from 1950 to 2006 to find the total number of papers in the database on each topic. It should be noted that there has been a large increase in the number of publications within the database over this time. I did not adjust for total number of papers in the database as, for example, Abrahamson and Fairchild (1999) have done with this kind of graph. This is because my purpose is to show the general rise in interest over time (which is represented by increases in articles and new publications) and not the relative instances of the two areas over time.

(26)

2.3 Early Theories of Management

We will now briefly review the historical landmarks of attempts to control the employment relationship over the last century. Although these are well-rehearsed in the management literature, a brisk tour will set us on the right path for the aims o f the research and lead us neatly to the emergence of teamworking.

2.3.1 Rational perspective

Since management emerged as a distinct class within organisations - the cadre around which plans are devised and resources are controlled - theories and strategies have competed to find a ‘total concept of management’ (George, 1968). What this might look like is unclear but the central aim is to resolve the ‘irresolvable’, or at least highly fragile, employment relationship (Rose, 1988). Storey (1985) refers to this more straightforwardly as the ‘problem of control’.

Edwards (1979) posits that management control systems correspond to stages of capitalist development, moving from simple or entrepreneurial forms, to technical labour processes, to bureaucracy (we now might add ‘post-bureaucracy’). In the early twentieth century managers were concerned with the challenge o f improving efficiency in engineering and factory systems. The body of ideas that transpired has been called the ‘rational systems’ perspective because it viewed organisations as purely functional systems purposed on achieving explicit goals (Scott, 1987). Frederick W. Taylor’s (1911) Principles o f Scientific Management became the most influential work within this perspective. Taylor’s thesis that careful measurement of work behaviours, processes and resources (e.g. through time and motion studies) could help to find the ‘one best way’ to achieve management goals has influenced every industry to the present day.

As organisations grew in size and management control became more complex, standardisation was seen as a more effective technique than simple supervision or rule-of-thumb decision making. Standardisation based on experimentation and scientific fact would provide authority that management, as well as labour, had to respect. Taylor observed that management coercion created only resentment and struggle in the workplace rather than compliance. Standardisation led to a strict

(27)

11

division o f labour - each man worked alone. Job descriptions and work procedures were written in the form of instruction cards and inventories. Another important consideration was personnel management and worker motivation. Taylor despised the ‘systematic soldiering’ and resistance of organised labour. He rewarded his workers well for being highly self-motivated and productive. For Taylor, the work group reduced worker motivation and led to inefficiencies. There was no need for collaboration among workers, only a good working relationship between management and the workforce. For this reason, Taylorism is often seen as the antithesis to teamworking. However, surprisingly one of the Taylor Society’s core principles was to ‘promote understandings, tolerances and the spirit of teamwork’ within the employment relationship (Cited in Person, 1929: 17).

Other theorists placed within the ‘rational systems’ paradigm put similar emphasis on the formal or technical aspects of the labour process. The Fordist assembly line organised labour in a highly structured and simplified production process. Weber’s (1958) bureaucracy offered regal-rational authority, similar to Taylor’s scientific evidence, as the most efficient control mechanism - holding both management and labour to account. Fayol (1949), Gulick and Urwick (1937) and colleagues’ administrative theory helped formalise organisational structures, departmentalism and job roles. Merton (1957: 195) notes, ‘formality facilitates the interaction of the occupants o f offices despite their private attitudes towards one another.’ Formalised structures are seen as independent of the participation o f any particular individual. The power and influence of leaders can thus be determined in part by the definition of their roles and not a function o f their personal qualities. These theories drew on the metaphor of the Zeitgeist - the early twentieth century mechanical machine. Individual workers were therefore seen as simple ‘cogs in an ever-moving mechanism’ (Weber, 1958: 181). For this reason Bennis (1959: 263) describes this perspective as ‘organizations without people’.

2.3.2 Natural perspectives

As the rational theories of Taylor and others diffused into industries across the USA and Europe, problems arose with the machine metaphor of organisation. While the rational approach had certainly increased productivity in various industries, this ‘total concept of management’ was failing due to the malign effects it was having on

(28)

workers. Motivation faltered and productivity started to drop. Industrial theorists picked up on the ‘alienating’ and ‘dehumanising’ impact of standardised routines. In direct opposition to the rationalists, a body of ‘natural systems’ theorists (Scott, 1987) emerged with the following thesis:

To administer a social organization according to purely technical criteria of rationality is [itself] irrational, because it ignores nonrational aspects of social conduct. (Blau, 1956: 56)

Mary Parker Follet (1924) was one of the earliest protagonists for a more collaborative and interdependent assessment of enterprise. She spoke directly about teams and how non-hierarchical committees combined with cross-functional departments would improve the work experience. The Hawthorne studies (which took place from 1927-1934) became the most extensive research programme representing a ‘natural systems’ approach (Rothlisberger and Dickson, 1939). The work of Elton Mayo (1933) and colleagues led to a proliferation of ideas about informal aspects of work and the importance of social groups. The new perspective emerged with the label of ‘Human Relations School’. Rothlisberger and Dickson (1939: 559) sum this up:

Many o f the actually existing patterns of human interaction [at work] have no representation in the formal organization at all, and others are inadequately represented by the formal organization. ... Too often it is assumed that the organization of a company corresponds to a blueprint plan or organization chart. Actually, it never does.

The Hawthorne studies examined the wider range of worker attitudes and behaviours in the ‘natural’ setting o f work in contrast to the experimental method of the day. Rather than all work behaviours being directed towards the attainment of goals; many activities reflected the need for workers to adapt and survive - they were ends in themselves. Litterer (1963) suggests the formal structures of work are those parts which are consciously planned whereas the informal structures are those parts which more or less spontaneously evolve. Yet the informal parts are not necessarily idiosyncratic or random, they are themselves ordered through group values and norms. Thus, the informal structure has as much influence on workers beliefs and behaviours as the formal structure (Scott, 1987). According to Procter et al. (2004) this perspective has two main implications. First, regardless of whether they have any previous affiliations, no collection of people can be in contact for any length of time at work without forming informal groupings. Second, because o f their resilient nature,

(29)

13

it would be futile to try to break up such groupings. The movement also demonstrated that previously ‘irrelevant’ differences such as race (Collins, 1946), class (Warner and Low, 1947), and cultural background (Dalton, 1950) had strong effects on allocation to work roles and organisational behaviour.

Barnard (1948) extended the sociological analysis of the Human Relations School to consider the psychology of the employment relationship. He stressed that organisations are essentially cooperative systems, integrating the contributions of their individual participants based on the willingness of worker participation. Barnard attempts to combine and reconcile two somewhat contradictory ideas: that goals are imposed from the top down; while their attainment depends on willing compliance from the bottom up. He argues that it is a ‘fiction that authority comes down from above’ (p. 170), noting the many situations in which leaders claim authority but fail to win compliance. Moreover, ‘the decision as to whether an order has authority or not lies with the persons to whom it is addressed and does not reside in “persons of authority” or those who issue these orders’ (p. 163). Therefore, informal work structures and incentives mediate the psychological response of workers to authority. Other important developments within the ‘natural’ perspective were Selznick’s (1949) institutional approach and Parson’s (1960) social system. This movement did not solve the ‘problem of control’ or construct a more convincing ‘total concept of management’ but its main contribution was to recognise the complexity of organisational life and the identification o f many variables previously overlooked. The engineer’s toolkit of time and motion experiments and formalised design logics were ineffective at tapping into the informal basis on human behaviour. This work therefore opened the door to a wider range of sociological and psychological disciplines to study the employment relationship. For this reason Bennis (1959: 266) describes the natural perspective ‘people without organizations’.

2.3.3 Conclusions

In summary, I have provided a rationale for reviewing the historical development of the team literature. I have also presented a brief account of the formative events in early management theory. Scott’s (1987) useful dichotomy of ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ systems perspectives was used to appreciate the contrast in attempts to understand and

(30)

control the employment relationship. The following chapter will consider the emergence o f specific ideas concerning teamworking in organisations.

(31)

15

CHAPTER 3

Team Traditions

3.1 Introduction

As the twentieth century progressed into its middle decades, academic interest grew about the reality of work and whether the void between rational and natural perspectives could be reconciled. The period leading up to, during, and immediately after the Second World War witnessed an explosion of ideas about social groups. It is this period where we may locate the origin of the first theoretical tradition of teamworking. It is this interesting period that we will now turn our attention.

3.1.1 Post war development: group dynamics

In the 1930s Kurt Lewin popularised the term ‘group dynamics’ as he expanded a psychological focus on individual differences towards a consideration of the ability of groups to influence individuals (Cartwright and Zander, 1953). The Second World War was an important catalyst in group research and development (Pasmore and Khalsa, 1993). During the early forties, Lewin undertook a large amount of work which emphasised the importance of applying group dynamics to social change. For example, he reported that he was able to use face-to-face group discussions to achieve a change in the attitude of housewives so that they accepted less desirable cuts of meat during the war period (Lewin, 1948).

The study of group dynamics advanced rapidly in the USA after the Second World War. Lewin established the ‘Center for Group Dynamics’ at MIT and later the National Training Laboratories (NTL) to consider the practical implications of group theory. The NTL’s short management training programmes and ‘T-Groups’ can be seen as the first example of ‘team building’ or ‘away days’ that are enthusiastically consumed by organisations today. A major concern of group dynamics theorists has been team roles and structure. Benne and Sheats (1948) devised a model o f group member roles including 1) group task roles; 2) group-building and maintenance; and 3) self-centred roles. Regarding structure, scholars largely agreed that it changes over time but various theories have been offered as to how and why it changes. Bennis and

(32)

Sheppard (1956) and Thelen and Dickerman (1949) provided early contributions; however Tuckman’s (1965) development stages become the most popular description: ‘forming’, ‘storming’, ‘norming’ and ‘performing’ (and later, with Jensen 1977, ‘adjourning’). In addition to structure, interdependence is an important consideration to understand interaction between team members. Thompson (1967) explained interdependence as taking three forms in order of complexity: pooled, sequential and reciprocal. Pooled is simply the additive effort of individual team members (i.e. the total output when the work of each individual is added together); sequential is interaction based on a linear process (e.g. the progression of a production line); while reciprocal is interaction based on a more complicated non-linear task (e.g. writing a report which involves the iterative input of many contributors). Later influential work building on group dynamics was Hackman and Oldham’s (1975, 1980) job enrichment framework. Placing the emphasis on individual needs based on the creation of critical psychological states, Hackman and Oldham outline core job dimensions (skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback). One of the main ways to fulfil these job dimensions is through re-structuring work around teams.

3.1.2 A wider organisational focus: open systems theory

Whereas group dynamics was primarily concerned with internal group processes informed by social psychology, another group of social scientists working in post-war Europe were interested in using a wider range o f techniques and theories which attempted to encompass the psychological, sociological and technical challenges of industrial systems. They were also more sensitive to the institutional and political context in which organisations operated in contrast to the abstracted theories of group dynamics and the ‘closed systems’ assumptions of the rational/natural systems. The enthusiasm and insight of one man in particular, Eric L. Trist, was seen as heralding in a new paradigm of group research in the 1950s within a ‘socio-psychological’ framework . Beyerlein and Porter (2000: x) suggest, ‘to some extent the history of work teams is the history of socio-technical systems theory ... Trist is the father of this perspective.’ Socio-technical systems (STS) theory grew into a highly influential

2 Trist engaged with debates at the time about the primacy o f the ‘psychological’ versus the ‘sociological’ in understanding social phenomena. He concluded that both were important, yet the ‘socio’ was super ordinate; hence a ‘socio-psychological’ framework (Emery, 1993; Pasmore and Khalsa, 1993).

(33)

17

perspective, spreading across countries and expanding over several decades. It is now regarded as one o f two main ‘team traditions’ within the literature (Benders and van Hootegem, 1999).

The second main team tradition came much later in the 1980s with the emergence of the ‘quality’ or ‘Japanese’ movement. This was precipitated by increasing global competition and American concern over Japan’s rapid economic development. Loosely, this period (1970s - 1990s) involved an interrogation o f the cultural and technical management strategies of Japanese firms. The resulting analysis led to enthusiastic management prescriptions such as continuous improvement (Cl), total quality management (TQM) and quality circles (QC). Widespread adopted of quality practices followed across the USA and Europe. Then in the early nineties ‘lean production’ burst onto the scene promising more technical efficiency than Western production systems. Teams lay at the heart o f the quality movement and widely permeated the scholarly and popular management discourse (Abrahamson, 1996).

We will now consider the two team traditions in more detail. I will draw attention to the key landmarks in the traditions’ development and then outline the main principles. Due to the high jacking of these concepts by mercenary consultants and popular media bandwagons I will guide a cautious and critical path through this literature, focussing predominantly on peer-reviewed academic publications. As such, trade journals and semi-academic publications lacking insightful analysis, such as TQM Magazine, Empowerment in organizations, and Quality Progress will be ignored.

3.2 Socio-technical Systems Theory

3.2.1 Introduction to tradition

The socio-technical perspective has been extremely influential in establishing and spreading interest in teamworking. Popular terms like ‘autonomous work groups’3 or more recently, ‘self-managing teams’ can be seen to derive from the principles of socio-technical systems (Benders, 2005). The official birthplace of STS design was the London-based Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. Over the course of several

3 Trist (1981) suggests that ‘autonomous work groups’ and ‘semi-autonomous work groups’, both popular STS applications, were regarded as synonymous by researchers at the Tavistock Institute. I will use the former in STS discussion.

(34)

decades, STS theory evolved into a set o f flexible and sometimes conflicting views about how to design jobs, work groups and organisations (Kelly, 1978; van Eijnatten,

1993).

The STS perspective identifies interdependencies, both within and between organisations, as the basic means of analysis. This is captured in the language o f systems theory. Organisations are recognized as ‘open systems’ (see Von Bertalanffy, 1950) which depend on interactions with the external environment for sustainability. Internally, organisations are considered to operate through the synchronous function of two sub-systems - the social system and the technical system - which are independent o f each other but must be complementary in order to maximise both quality of work life and productivity (Trist, 1981). In other words, there must be compatibility between the design of technology (tools, techniques and knowledge) and the social arrangement o f employees. It is important that technology does not dictate the social aspects of work or over-determine the means of organisational goal-attainment, but rather that the ‘joint optimization’ (see Emery, 1959) of technology and people should be achieved by utilizing the adaptability and innovativeness of people in attaining organisational goals (Chems, 1976). This latter point emphasizes the centrality of ‘autonomy’ to STS. While STS provides few standard recommendations, one consistent proposal was to implement self-managing teams. Benders and van Hootegem (1999) provide a general definition of what a socio-technical team might look like:

A group o f workers, generally between 4 and 20 persons, responsible for a rounded-off part of the production process, and entitled to take certain decisions autonomously, (p. 615).

STS relies on three main assumptions. First, while organisational design is not always completely rational, it is choiceful (Pasmore, 1988). This means that organisational members have the opportunity to identify various organisational design options and are capable of undertaking considerable change by choosing to implement particular designs (Pasmore and Khalsa, 1993). A key feature of organisational design is the discovery o f choices (Ketchum and Trist, 1992). Second, it is assumed that organisations are agreements among interdependent people and changes in the operation o f organisations will affect these agreements and vice-versa. Therefore, in addition to determining which changes in design will be most effective, it is especially

(35)

19

important to focus attention on the process o f change itself (Pasmore, 1988). A third assumption is that employee participation and interdependent work (i.e. using cooperative teams) can positively impact outcomes at the individual, team and organisational level (Trist, 1981). This is because people are considered to be fundamentally social beings (Emery, 1993); that is, beings that depend on relationships with each other for survival and fulfilment. Advocates of STS suggest that the approach has proven successful in organisations throughout the world for the past four decades (e.g. Pasmore et al., 1978; Taylor, 1975). Over this time, STS has generated strong waves of interest in the UK, Scandinavia, Holland, Australia and the USA.

3.2.2 Origin and early development

STS design emerged as a scholarly concept in the early 1950s as a result of research undertaken at the Tavistock Institute. During post-war reconstruction of British industry (late 40s - mid 50s) consultants at the Tavistock were involved in field projects focussing on the diffusion of innovative work practices and organisational arrangements which did not require major capital investment but which gave promise o f raising productivity (Trist and Murray, 1993). The British coal mining industry became a central focus, given that the chief source of industrial power at the time was coal fuel, making the industry important to the British economy. Furthermore, the industry had newly been nationalised but was not performing very well. Productivity was low and had failed to improve with increases in mechanisation of coal-getting. Mining was losing popularity as an occupation, with men leaving the pits in large numbers for more attractive opportunities in the factory world (Trist and Murray, 1993). Given these challenges, the National Coal Mining Board commissioned the Tavistock to conduct a series of action research projects to study the problems in the industry. Eric Trist, a founding member, and later chairman of the Tavistock, became the chief project officer. The findings of the studies were published in the influential book Organizational Choice (Trist et al., 1963).

In the early stages of the mining project, Trist collaborated with Ken Bamforth, a postgraduate fellow at the Tavistock Institute studying industrial field work. He had previously been a miner and while studying returned to the coalfield to report on any new perceptions he might have. Bamforth returned with news of innovation in work

(36)

practice at the Haighmoor seam of the south Yorkshire coalfield; an observation which would provide the seed for the burgeoning STS perspective (Trist, 1981; Trist and Murray, 1993). Trist and Bamforth visited a variety of pits to examine the reaction of miners to the changing working conditions on the coalface. The resulting discoveries were published in the locus classicus of the socio-technical tradition, the Human Relations paper ‘Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting’ (Trist and Bamforth, 1951). This paper described the adverse effects of mechanisation and changes in work organisation on the coalface. Before mechanisation, small multiskilled groups handled the entire production process autonomously under the ‘hand-got’ system of coal-getting. Trist and Bamforth (1951) reported:

The groups themselves were interdependent working pairs to whom one or two individuals might be attached. ... A primary work-organization of this type had the advantage o f placing responsibility for the complete coal-getting task squarely on the shoulders of a single, face-to-face group which experienced the entire cycle of operations within the compass of its membership. ... Leadership and “supervision” were internal to the group, which had a quality of responsible autonomy. ... The wholeness of the work task, the multiplicity of the skills of the individual, and the self-selection of the group were congruent attributes of a pattern of responsible autonomy that characterized the pair-based face teams of hand-got mining, (p. 6-7)

When management introduced the semi-automated ‘longwall’ method of coal-getting, the work organisation changed dramatically. This method enlarged the scale of operation to work units consisting of 40-50 men, who worked three shifts and had their jobs broken down into one-man-one-task roles. Coordination and control had been externalized through supervision, which had become coercive (Trist, 1981). The interdependent nature of coal-getting tasks required close co-operation and intensive communication, yet the new shift system and the underground working conditions led to numerous difficulties in the production process (Mueller et al., 2000). Trist and Bamforth (1951) concluded that such problems would be difficult to resolve without restoring responsible autonomy to primary groups throughout the system and ensuring that each o f these groups owned a satisfying sub-whole as its work task (Buchanan,

1994). These conclusions supported Bamforth’s earlier observations at Haighmoor where miners had modified their work system in reaction to the problems of the longwall method. This innovation, labelled the ‘shortwall’ method, offered a solution

(37)

21

to many o f the socio-psychological problems that Trist and Bamforth (1951) were identifying. Trist (1981) later reflected on events at the Haighmoor:

The work organization o f the new seam, to us, a novel phenomenon consisted of a set of relatively autonomous groups interchanging roles and shifts and regulating their affairs with a minimum of supervision. Cooperation between task groups was everywhere in evidence; personal commitment was obvious, absenteeism low, accidents infrequent, productivity high. The men told us that in order to adapt with best advantage to the technical conditions in the new seam, they had evolved a form of work organization based on practices common in unmechanized days when small groups, who took responsibility for the entire cycle, had worked autonomously. ... As became clearer later, what happened in the Haighmoor seam gave to Bamforth and myself a first glimpse of ‘the emergence of a new paradigm of work’ (Emery, 1978) in which the best match would be sought between the requirements of the social and technical systems, (p. 8-9)

The Haighmoor miners can be seen as the pioneers of ‘autonomous work groups’. It was their intuitive response to the technical challenge of the coal seam that led to Trist and Bamforth’s initial observations. With the help of Australian academic Fred Emery, Trist readily used these observations to form the theory of STS. Further studies in the coal industry corroborated the early findings, discovering different configurations of teams across the industry and placing ‘choice’ (and hence autonomy) at the heart of the analysis.

3.2.3 Further STS development

Following the early STS studies, researchers at the Tavistock continued to probe for more instances o f autonomous group works, exploring a wide range of organisations such as Shell, Proctor and Gamble, General Food and a large teaching hospital. The general theme was again converting highly fragmented and individual tasks into a more varied group process. Trist (1981) reports that, in general, higher productivity and improved employee attitudes were experienced. However, the majority o f the studies met with management conservatism and a lack o f sustainability. Trist (1981) reflected somewhat discouragingly:

As the last years of the postwar period came to a close in the early fifties, the mood o f the society changed from collaboration, which had fostered local innovation, to competition and an adversarial climate in management-labour relations, which discouraged it. No further instances of an alternative [socio- technical] pattern were identified (p. 20).

(38)

These observations led Trist to propose that no further advances in socio-technical work systems could be expected until changes in ‘the extended social field’ of forces at the ‘macro-social’ level were realised (Trist, 1981: 24). In other words, the small- scale and sporadic research projects of the fifties could not provide enough impact in the industrial and cultural context to change working methods across institutions. What was needed, according to Trist, was a more coordinated, Government-led programme of change. The requisite movement of this kind appeared to occur in Norway in 1962, with the introduction of the Norway Industrial Democracy Project. Norway was undergoing little economic development at the time and was seen to be lagging behind its Scandinavian counterparts. Large scale projects were planned in two of the least well performing industries - paper pulp and metal working. However, after several attempts the programme did not significantly materialise, as many of the project sites became ‘encapsulated’ (Herbst, 1976); meaning that there was no overall linkage or coordination between different areas of the programme and a consequent lack of momentum led to insignificant progress (see Cotton, 1993). The macro-social field was again seen to be the decisive obstacle.

A more hopeful diffusion took place in Sweden at the end of the sixties when the Norwegian project had generated some interest with Swedish professional bodies (Trist, 1981). By 1973, more than 500 work-improvement projects of various sizes were going on in many industries (Trist, 1981). Generally, emphasis was placed on job enrichment oriented teamworking. While the Swedish projects adopted the basic STS notions o f ‘joint optimisation’ and the importance o f the social system, in practice they were characterised by a pragmatic stance and many different types of experiment were conducted. Nevertheless, Sweden is possibly the country in which socio-technical ideas have been most widely applied (Karlsson, 1995). The Swedish projects led to some of the most celebrated and controversial examples of autonomous work groups: the Kalmar and Uddevalla plants o f the automotive manufacturer Volvo (Berggren, 1993; Sandberg, 1995). These plants became a ‘management tourist attraction’ (Mueller et al., 2000). Saab also experimented with self-managing teams (Katz and Kahn, 1978). Like many o f the previous experiments, the impetus for the change was workforce problems such as absenteeism, labour turnover and worker resistance; and general performance problems such as poor product quality and low productivity.

Teamworking: history, development and function: a case study in Welsh local government